[OSGeo-Conf] Who's Got Next?

[Eric Wolf]

My two-cents...
Maybe it would be worth encouraging the development of regional events and
then just have the international FOSS4G rotate through. This provides for
two things:

1. The regional LOCs don't feel like they wasted their time if the effort
was towards a known conference. So, instead of creating an entire, big
conference, we just get asked to increase the size of what we are already
doing.

2. Groups in the further reaches actually get to develop regional support
for FOSS4G. Folks who cannot travel are able to participate, rather than
just the fortunate few globetrotters who can make it to the big
international event.

What I saw of the Beijing proposal almost had more of a regional character.
And I'm sure China has both a strong FOSS community and a large number of
people who are not allowed to travel abroad. The same could be said for
South America. There is some fantastic support for FOSS but they weren't
even represented with a bid (or even mentioned in Paul's discussion).

I'm very interested in a US regional FOSS4G conference. If we have to wait
for 2011 (at the soonest) for a US FOSS4G, it'll be at the end of Obama's
first term. I think it's important to establish that there are FOSS
alternatives to ESRI when it comes to meeting the new President's goals for
sharing government information.

That's my 2cents..

-Eric
-=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=-
Eric B. Wolf                          720-209-6818
USGS Geographer
Center of Excellence in GIScience
PhD Student
CU-Boulder - Geography



On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 9:21 PM, Paul Ramsey <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca>wrote:

> I'd like to raise the idea of being more explicit about what we,
> OSGeo, desire in bids. We have in the past said we weren't going to
> explicitly add "geography" to the RFP, but I can't help but feel that
> we are to some extent we are doing it implicitly, and that's probably
> not fair to bidders who aren't in the "target region" for a given
> year.
>
> In my handicapping of the process for this year, I figured that if
> credible bids from North America or Europe were available, it was
> unlikely that a bid from anywhere else was going to win, just because
> the previous two events were "afar" from the bulk of the OSGeo
> development community. As it happened, we had bids from both, and one
> of the European bids won, which is kind of as one would expect, given
> that the last European event was in 2006 (that's a four year
> interregnum, had they failed to win, it would be at least a five year
> gap between events in a very FOSS4G-friendly and FOSS4G-funding
> locale).
>
> Was this fair to Beijing? How much better would their bid have to have
> been for us to choose another location in Asia/Pacific, right after
> Sydney, and a third non-NA-EURO location in a row? I felt that the top
> bids were all sufficiently good that there was little left to
> distinguish them at a rational level, which doesn't leave much room
> for someone to really "blow it out of the water". All that's left is
> our own biases, which probably include, let's face it, geography.
>
> We've got a pretty demanding bid process now, and bidders are doing a
> fair amount of leg-work. Four bidders means three bidders who feel
> they've worked hard "for nothing". I don't want people entering the
> bidding process if they really don't stand a chance for (implicit)
> geographical reasons.
>
> I think we should be explicit, and try to get bids from particular
> regions on a schedule: Europe, North America, Other. I apologize to
> Other in advance, but if FOSS4G is going to be the "meeting of the
> tribes" we need to hold it closer to the tribes more often, and the
> tribes are mostly in Euro/NA.
>
> P.
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